San Francisco Supervisor Rafael Mandelman announced a proposal for a city ordinance that would ensure unhoused people will have a safe place to sleep on Tuesday.
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In a press conference on Tuesday, Mandelman announced that a "new and improved" version of "A Place for All" is being proposed as a city and San Francisco County-wide policy that will require the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing to prepare a plan within the next three years.
"San Franciscans are frustrated, and rightly so, that after multiple decades and many billions of dollars spent to 'solve homelessness,' thousands of unhoused people continue to sleep on the streets night after night," said Mandelman in a statement Tuesday. "For all the money we spend and have spent, it's reasonable to expect clear improvement in the situation on the streets, and frankly people are not seeing that."
The plan required by the ordinance will need to include an estimate of the number of people that would need to be sheltered, how much it would cost to get the program off the ground and how much it will take to keep it operational.
"Street sleeping doesn't make someone safe, sane, or sober," said Mark Nagel, co-founder of RescueSF, a local organization focused on helping the homeless population. "Conditions in our neighborhoods are significantly worse today than ever before. Our City leaders need to commit to shelter all who want a roof over their heads as a first step on the path out of homelessness."
Along with the plan, the new policy would require the Director of Real Estate to assess potential spaces that could be used for shelters, tiny home communities, or safe sleeping sites.
Then, the finished plan would be sent to the Board of Supervisors for consideration and the next step will be to assess funding options.
It's likely that the plan would cost up to $1 billion to cover costs from everything to beds to tiny homes.
"This is not a plan to build housing for every single person, it's a plan to have at least a bed for the people who are on our streets on any given night," said co-sponsor of the proposal, Supervisor Matt Haney.
The number of unhoused people who would require shelter would be reevaluated annually and the program's operations will be evaluated every two years.
As part of the ordinance, the city will adhere to more transparency on shelter availability, which will be achieved by creating a dashboard on the city's website displaying not only the total number of shelters in the city, but also type, number of units, and occupancy rate.
The previous version of this ordinance stalled out with the Board of Supervisors. The new iteration will be proposed for consideration at a Board of Supervisors meeting on Tuesday.
"This legislation is an important first step in a process that San Francisco has so far refused to engage in, to the great detriment of our neighborhoods and our unhoused," said Mandelman.
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